Thursday, July 24, 2008

So I've been off here for sometime but I plan to blog quite a bit over the weekend and hopefully get back into the swing of things. Also giving some thought to having another crack at pushing gravybrowning back into some development action - I'm going to get a hold of wordpress over the weekend and see how I get on from there.

Anyway, I digress - I'm in Canada at the moment - Toronto to be precise but I'll get to that later. The reason I am here was Nick's wedding, I am going to post some pics on my facebook page around that when I get back to the UK - though I was best manning so I had to entrust the photographing to the bride's mum.

There aren't really enough words to describe the falls themselves - even the crappy American falls are pretty awesome but the horsehoe falls were mind numbing. We did a couple of trips on the maid of the mist which takes you right to the base of the falls and gets you quite damp, but it is well worth the little money they charge for it. I would go into greater detail but it always annoys me when people come back from trips like this and they waffle on about how amazing the sights and sounds are - they can't possibly hope to convey anything of the feeling of being there, no matter how many hundreds of photos you show me! So there will be photos on my facebook page but nobody is forcing you to look at them OK?

Everything around the falls was utter tat though. Imagine someone who has had Las Vegas described to them by a blind madman in a language they didn't understand. Then that guy goes to a mentally unstable town planner and describes the same thing using crayons and spilled pudding. That town planner then builds something vaguely resembling that picture. That is pretty much what surrounds one of the great natural wonders of the world - Neon, plastic, vile, tacky. Shit.

If you go to the falls, just go to the falls and go for like a day because unless you have a reason to be there it can be quite soul destroying.

Happily I had a reason to be there, as did Nick, Kara and all the family and friends who had traveled for the occasion so was kept pretty busy for most of the time that I was there, mainly trying to make sure Nick was in the right place at the appointed hour. He wasn't nervous or getting cold feet you understand, just.... well put it this way - I have never met anyone in my life who has such a limited understanding of the passage of time. I can only describe this in two ways - at great length or in a brief sentence - we'll go for the latter. OK, here goes. Imagine 5 minutes. Got it? OK now you just need to imagine thinking that every single thing in life takes 5 minutes and, more than that, all other measurements of time are just different ways of saying '5 minutes'. That's Nick.

OK, I thought I'd posted this a couple days ago but apparently blogger broke and I no longer have any idea what I wrote. Knowing the way I write I am not going to put myself through reading this crap so I will conclude with this, and hope it isn't in the verbal vomit above : Nick and Kara are now Mr and Mrs Brooks, the wedding, the bride, the setting and the ceremony were beautiful. Nick managed to not look like a bearded coat rack, basically it went brilliantly and I wish them all the happiness in the world. Well. Not all of it, they can't have the bit of happiness I get from cartoons or food. But they are welcome to the rest of it.